Want to make a Mexican in Mexico very angry? Look at him and call Mexico a “failed state.”
To be fair, Mexico is not Beirut or Medellin in the 1980s. Go down to any major Mexican city and you see people going to work or dining on Saturday night or attending a birthday party.
It looks normal but is not really normal. Mexico has very serious problems, as we see in this article by John Daniel Davidson:
Last Thursday in the city of Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, a battle erupted between government forces and drug cartel gunmen after the Mexican military captured two sons of jailed drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.The elder son, Ivan, was quickly freed by his men, who overpowered government forces and secured his release.Ivan then launched an all-out siege of the entire city in an effort to free his younger brother, Ovidio.
And the bad guys got their way!
In public, Mexicans get angry when you say “failed state.” In private, they will tell you that they don’t really know who runs Sinaloa.
As a Mexican friend said: “Did the government just lose Sinaloa to the cartels”?
No, Sinaloa is still part of Mexico, but the cartels demonstrated two things:
First, they have weapons and people who know how to use them. How much longer before the cartels have their own fighter jets and bomb government locations? I don’t know, but there are fighter jets for sale in the black market.
Second, the Lopez-Obrador adminstration needs to realize that the U.S.-Mexico border is a national security threat. How did those weapons get to Mexico? And what about the dollars financing their operations? There is a big hole on the border and the cartels own it!
Maybe someone will ask the Democrats about Mexico in their next debate.
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